Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town Into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe--And Started the Protestant Reformation (6 page)

Most likely Luther would have been happy to slip away from the hubbub of the market and take refuge in the nearby parish church. This, rather than the castle church at the other end of town, was now his spiritual home. It was here, in 1514, that he had first begun to assert his extraordinary influence over Wittenberg’s citizens, in sermons of mesmerizing power and passion. In 1543 he now shared these preaching duties with his great friend, Johannes Bugenhagen.

To Wittenberg’s older residents the church would have been virtually unrecognizable from thirty years before. Particularly in its interior architecture, the impact of Luther’s Reformation was quite unmissable. Gone were the numerous side altars, with their priests celebrating Mass and the constant mumbling of propitiatory prayer. Instead all spiritual energy was concentrated on the central worship service. The church’s furnishing was remodeled to reflect the new shape of congregational worship, built around prayer, Bible reading, the singing of hymns, and preaching. Since Wittenberg, rather unusually for a town of this size, had only one parish church, the Sunday worship service would in effect have been a gathering of the whole community. Here they would have heard Luther preach as many as four thousand times in his thirty years as their minister. A privilege for which admirers would journey
many miles was part of the everyday experience of Wittenberg’s citizens. It helps explain the remarkable influence Luther exercised in his own community.

Luther’s role as city preacher to some extent eclipsed the importance of the castle church, particularly when the elector was not in residence. Frederick the Wise had passed away in 1525, still stubbornly clinging to both his traditional Catholic faith and his celebrity professor. But under Luther’s influence his wondrous collection of relics was quietly packed away; from 1522 they were no longer exhibited, and pilgrims were forced to go elsewhere for the promise of salvation. Frederick’s successors, his brother John (who ruled from 1525 to 1532), and nephew John Frederick (from 1532 to 1547), were if anything even firmer in their support for Luther; in this he had been fortunate indeed. By 1543 Luther’s trips outside Wittenberg were usually concerned with service to the electoral family or with preaching to them in their other residences.

So leaving the parish church Luther would have been unlikely to have bent his steps to the castle; he might instead have turned right, away from the river and into the residential area to the north. This was where most of Wittenberg’s printers had established their premises. Luther took a keen interest in the publication of his books, and nowhere was the transformation of Wittenberg more dramatically demonstrated than in the teeming mass of printers, booksellers, and bookbinders that filled the workshops of this busy quarter.

In 1513, when we first followed Luther through Wittenberg, he would not have had to go far to visit Wittenberg’s printers, since the university print shop was situated in the immediate vicinity of the Augustinian monastery. This was the only printing press in operation at that time. That year, it published just ten works, all in Latin, and all for the students and professors of the university: copies of orations, textbooks, and the like.
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Even though the printer, Johann Rhau-Grunenberg, was notoriously slow, the surviving books would not have kept his press busy for more than a small portion of the year.
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In 1543, in contrast, Wittenberg
sustained six busy shops, between them responsible for some eighty-three editions. Of these, half were in German and half in Latin; most of the copies would have been destined for export. With the swarm of ancillary workers involved in the trade, wholesalers, bookbinders, carters, and merchants responsible for the complex monetary transactions of long-distance commerce, publishing was undoubtedly one of the largest industries in this thriving city. Its most successful figures, such as the publisher Moritz Goltz, were among the richest inhabitants of the town.
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The bare statistics capture only a part of this transformation, but they are nevertheless striking. Between 1502 and 1516, five successive printers published a total of 123 books, an average of 8 a year.
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All were in Latin and most very small. None of the printers seem to have made much of a living out of this. This was an industry teetering on the brink of viability, probably sustained only by direct subsidy from the elector and the university.
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Between 1517 and 1546, on the other hand, Wittenberg publishers turned out at least 2,721 works, an average of 91 per year.
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This represents around three million individual copies, and includes many of the milestone works of the era, not least multiple editions of Luther’s German Bible.

This vast blossoming of what was essentially a new industry was entirely due to Martin Luther. One in three of all the books published during these three decades were Luther’s own works and another 20 percent were those of his Wittenberg colleagues and followers.
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Even in 1543, when the passions of the first years were a distant memory, half the books published were written by either Luther or Philip Melanchthon. And the Luther effect proved enduring. Even after his death, the industry continued to grow, reaching 165 new editions in 1563 and over 200 annually in the last decade of the century. Wittenberg was now Germany’s largest publishing center, eclipsing established centers of the book trade like Strasbourg and Cologne, overtaking even mighty Augsburg and Nuremberg.
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Thanks to its favorite son, Wittenberg had subverted the iron
economics of publishing, the apparent requirement that major production centers could only be located in Europe’s principal commercial cities. This was a transformation that seemed to many contemporaries quite miraculous, among them Luther himself, who could never quite fathom his own extraordinary popularity as an author. Naturally he gave the credit to the direct intervention of a beneficent deity: printing, he believed, was technology heaven-sent to spread God’s word and banish error. In fact, as we shall see, the emergence of Wittenberg as a publishing giant was far from straightforward. For several years after Luther’s bold challenge first sent shock waves through Germany, most of his works were published elsewhere. Wittenberg’s printers—in the first instance, Wittenberg’s sole printer, Rhau-Grunenberg—were seemingly overwhelmed by the astonishing appetite for their local prophet. It took several years, and Luther’s direct intervention, before an industry could be constructed to ensure that the publication of Luther’s works could be marshaled within his own city. In the process these newcomers helped develop the distinctive look that forever shaped the image of Luther in the wider world and radically changed the readership of the book industry.

This transformation, essentially the story of this book, is in reality three transformations: of Luther, the intense monk, into a best-selling author; of the book industry, shaken from its roots in a scholarly, Latinate book world by the emergence of a mass market; and of Wittenberg. For this was the town that Luther made, and the electric bolt to the local economy would be replicated by a rippling echo of smaller transformations as other of Germany’s cities shared in the booming demand for a new type of literature.

Martin Luther was a theologian of great insight, a charismatic leader and preacher, a writer of great passion and skill. But he was also, without any doubt, the chief motor of the Wittenberg economy. Nothing else could have made this small, peripheral city into the print capital of Gutenberg’s homeland; but this, for around eighty years after 1517, was Wittenberg’s unlikely fate. It is these two stories, the spiritual and
theological, and the economic and commercial, that need to be woven together to understand the extraordinary impact of the Reformation. In this way, Wittenberg, the small border town perched on the edge of civilization, would share with Luther responsibility for igniting one of the great transforming movements of the last millennium.

2.

T
HE
M
AKING
OF
A
R
EVOLUTIONARY

ARTIN
L
UTHER’S FIRST YEARS
in Wittenberg were a period of discovery and exploration; his subsequent celebrity was in no way preordained. If we require proof of this we need look no further than a remarkable document compiled in 1515 by an unknown humanist author: a list with biographical sketches of 101 professors associated with the universities of Leipzig, Wittenberg, and Frankfurt-an-der-Oder.
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None of these institutions was in the front rank of Europe’s universities. Leipzig was a medieval foundation, but Wittenberg and Frankfurt-an-der-Oder were very recent, both established in the last twenty years. The list, never actually published, was probably drawn up as part of a student recruitment campaign for the three universities in northeastern Germany. Yet even in this relatively undistinguished company there was no place in the top one hundred for Wittenberg’s professor of biblical theology: Martin Luther.

The reason for this neglect is not far to seek. In 1515 Luther, although an established fixture on the Wittenberg University faculty, had published nothing. His first tentative steps into print came only the following year, 1516, the year before the indulgence controversy. Yet within
four years of this, Luther would be one of the most famous men in Germany: revered, or reviled, for the bold, defiant pronouncements that had thrown his church into turmoil and the German Empire into constitutional crisis.

The speed and sheer improbability of this transformation have been a continuous challenge for historians from the time that Luther’s own followers first began to offer their interpretations of this extraordinary life. In particular Luther’s early years, his intellectual formation, and the genesis of his revolutionary theology remain a difficult study. Luther’s halfhearted promise to write an autobiographical introduction to the planned collected edition of his works fell prey to other commitments and his declining health.
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The friends who shared his table concentrated on recording the constant flow of words rather than asking probing questions about his upbringing. One of the first contemporary biographies was compiled by a dogged opponent, Johannes Cochlaeus, who naturally put an unsympathetic construction on Luther’s rejection of his monastic vows and his former loyalties.
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This at least was the work of a scholar; though the author’s repetition of the fable that attributed Luther’s birth to his mother’s coupling with the devil in a bathhouse did him no particular credit.

In truth, the known facts of Luther’s upbringing provide little clues to his tumultuous impact on German society. The first thirty years of his life are remarkably conventional: the product of a loving, relatively prosperous family, set on a course for a secure if relatively unassuming career. Having decided on a career in the church, Luther exhibited a determined commitment to institutions that had provided him with significant opportunities to develop his talents as a teacher, if not yet, as we have seen, as a published author. We will not explain the extraordinary eruption of passionate, creative energy of the years after 1515 by an investigation of the surprisingly fragmentary details of Luther’s upbringing. What we may see, however, are the building blocks that would shape Luther’s worldview and sustain him through his time of maximum vulnerability: the thorough grounding in the learning of his day; the
network of friends and patrons who saw in him an unusual talent and were prepared to stick by him through his whirlwind spiral of controversy and confrontation; most of all, his university.

Luther’s commitment to Wittenberg was by no means immediate. When he was first sent to lecture at the new university, he returned to Erfurt after a year with little regret. The definitive transfer in 1511, at the urging of his friend and patron Johann von Staupitz, could easily have seemed like an uncomfortable exile from the more sophisticated company of Erfurt. But in the years that followed, Luther committed himself wholeheartedly to the project of the university, and to its ethos. It was here that his unexpected genius as a creative thinker was first unlocked. It was in the university’s cause that he first sought out controversy, and first began to gather a following. It was in championing the University of Wittenberg that Luther first became a leader, and posed his first challenge to the theological orthodoxies of the day.

YOUNG MAN LUTHER

Martin Luther was born in the small German town of Eisleben, almost certainly in November 1483.
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Although by a strange coincidence Luther also died there, Eisleben would play only a minor role in Luther’s personal itinerary, since the family moved on shortly after he was born. This was a relatively prosperous home; Luther’s father, Hans, had been born into a family of independent farmers from Möhra (now Moorgrund), near Eisenach in Thuringia. His wife, Margarethe Lindemann, came from a family that had recently moved to Eisenach from Bad Neustadt in northern Bavaria, about sixty miles away. The Lindemanns were on sufficiently good terms with Hans to provide capital for his business ventures.